"Crs Town, the Metropolis, is a neat, pretty place. The inhabitants polite and live in a very gentile manner. The streets and houses regularly built—the ladies and gentlemen gay in their dress; upon the whole you will find as many agreeable people of both sexes for the size of the place as almost any where...."[158]
Companies great enough to give the modern housewife nervous prostration were often entertained at dinners, while many of the planters kept such open house that no account was kept of the number of guests who came and went daily and who commonly made themselves so much at home that the host or hostess often scarcely disturbed them throughout their entire stay. Several years after the Revolution George Washington recorded in his diary the surprising fact that for the first time since he and Martha Washington had returned to Mount Vernon, they had dined alone. As Wharton says in her Martha Washington, "Warm hearted, open-handed hospitality was constantly exercised at Mount Vernon, and if the master humbly recorded that, although he owned a hundred cows, he had sometimes to buy butter for his family, the entry seems to have been made in no spirit of fault finding." Of this same Washingtonian hospitality one French traveller, Brissot de Warville, wrote: "Every thing has an air of simplicity in his [Washington's] house; his table is good, but not ostentatious; and no deviation is seen from regularity and domestic economy. Mrs. Washington superintends the whole, and joins to the qualities of an excellent housewife that simple dignity which ought to characterize a woman whose husband has acted the greatest part on the theater of human affairs; while she possesses that amenity and manifests that attention to strangers which renders hospitality so charming."[159]
With such hospitality there seemed to go a certain elevation in the social life of Virginia and South Carolina entirely different from the corrupt conditions found in Louisiana in the seventeenth century, and also in contrast with the almost cautious manner in which the New Englanders of the same period tasted pleasure. In those magnificent Southern houses—Quincey speaks of one costing £8000, a sum fully equal in modern buying capacity to $100,000—there was much stately dancing, almost an extreme form of etiquette, no little genuine art, and music of exceptional quality. The Charleston St. Cecilia Society, organized in 1737, gave numerous amateurs opportunities to hear and perform the best musical compositions of the day, and its annual concerts, continued until 1822, were scarcely ever equalled elsewhere in America, during the same period. In the aristocratic circles formal balls were frequent, and were exceedingly brilliant affairs. Eliza Pinckney, describing one in 1742, says: "...The Govr gave the Gentn a very gentile entertainment at noon, and a ball at night for the ladies on the Kings birthnight, at wch was a Crowded Audience of Gentn and ladies. I danced a minuet with yr old acquaintance Capt Brodrick who was extreamly glad to see one so nearly releated to his old friend...."[160] Ravenel in her Eliza Pinckney reconstructs from her notes a picture of one of those dignified balls or fêtes in the olden days:
"On such an occasion as that referred to, a reception for the young bride who had just come from her own stately home of Ashley Hall, a few miles down the river, the guests naturally wore all their braveries. Their dresses, brocade, taffety, lute-string, etc., were well drawn up through their pocket holes. Their slippers, to match their dresses, had heels even higher and more unnatural than our own.... With bows and courtesies, and by the tips of their fingers, the ladies were led up the high stone steps to the wide hall, ... and then up the stair case with its heavy carved balustrade to the panelled rooms above.... Then, the last touches put to the heads (too loftily piled with cushions, puffs, curls, and lappets, to admit of being covered with anything more than a veil or a hood).... Gay would be the feast...."
"The old silver, damask and India china still remaining show how these feasts were set out.... Miss Lucas has already told us something of what the country could furnish in the way of good cheer, and we may be sure that venison and turkey from the forest, ducks from the rice fields, and fish from the river at their doors, were there.... Turtle came from the West Indies, with 'saffron and negroe pepper, very delicate for dressing it.' Rice and vegetables were in plenty—terrapins in every pond, and Carolina hams proverbially fine. The desserts were custards and creams (at a wedding always bride cake and floating island), jellies, syllabubs, puddings and pastries.... They had port and claret too ... and for suppers a delicious punch called 'shrub,' compounded of rum, pineapples, lemons, etc., not to be commended by a temperance society."
"The dinner over, the ladies withdrew, and before very long the scraping of the fiddlers would call the gentlemen to the dance,—pretty, graceful dances, the minuet, stately and gracious, which opened the ball; and the country dance, fore-runner of our Virginia reel, in which every one old, and young joined."[161]
It is little wonder that Eliza Pinckney, upon returning from just such a social function to take up once more the heavy routine of managing three plantations, complained: "At my return thither every thing appeared gloomy and lonesome, I began to consider what attraction there was in this place that used so agreeably to soothe my pensive humor, and made me indifferent to everything the gay world could boast; but I found the change not in the place but in myself."[162]
The domestic happiness found in these plantation mansions was apparently ideal. Families were generally large; there was much inter-marriage, generation after generation, within the aristocratic circle; and thus everybody was related to everybody. This gave an excuse for an amount of informal and prolonged visiting that would be almost unpardonable in these more practical and in some ways more economical days. There was considerable correspondence between the families, especially among the women, and by means of the numerous references to visits, past or to come, we may picture the friendly cordial atmosphere of the time. Washington, for instance, records that he "set off with Mrs. Washington and Patsy, Mr. [Warner] Washington and wife, Mrs. Bushrod and Miss Washington, and Mr. Magowen for 'Towelston,' in order to stand for Mr. B. Fairfax's third son, which I did with my wife, Mr. Warner Washington and his lady." "Another day he returns from attending to the purchase of western lands to find that Col. Bassett, his wife and children, have arrived during his absence, 'Billy and Nancy and Mr. Warner Washington being here also.' The next day the gentlemen go a-hunting together, Mr. Bryan Fairfax having joined them for the hunt and the dinner that followed."
Again, we find Mrs. Washington writing, with her usual unique spelling and sentence structure, to her sister:
"Mt. Vernon Aug 28 1762.